It’s that time of year when Wall Street soothsayers look ahead 12 months and try to divine the path of US stocks. Last year at this time, no one writing for a major sell-side firm thought stocks would perform anywhere near as well as they did, up 23 per cent in 2024.

The median prognosticator thought we would probably move sideways, and a few bears were calling for a meaningful sell-off. The same was basically true of the forecasts the year before that. In retrospect, that failure of imagination almost looked like a contrarian bullish sign.

Bloomberg Opinion